Poetry. Women's Studies. Angela Veronica Wong's ELSA unfolds the story of a fictional 18th-century French demimondaine and mistress of Louis XV. Meditating on gender, identity, and the precarity of women's lives against the scrim of patriarchal power and capital, the foils of the sonnet form and storytelling shape Wong's critique. Both adhering to and breaking the strictures of rhyme and meter, much as Elsa wears and divests herself of corset and panniers, Wong's sonnets shift between the politics of the French court and the streets of New York, the poems navigating the shoals of female embodiment, as we slip between then and now, narrated and narrator. Her beauty a discipline alternately wielded by and against her, "Elsa is droll they say / Elsa is a doll. Elsa is a hole / inside you put your secrets." In the interstices of her childhood, affairs, and births, Elsa resists, interrogating each exchange, each lover as pieces in a game of strategy in which to endure is to win, the price of freedom, the silence she keeps. "Elsa is someone you can talk to. She knows more than you perhaps might want her to, about you and about herself and about the world, and she cannot possibly hold that knowing back. Yet, she also defies a confining comprehension, positioning herself as eyewitness to all manner of feminine constructions and destructions. Elsa is an irresistible storyteller, willing co- conspirator, sly everywoman and, most importantly, the perfect confidante--the revealer and the keeper of mysteries both individual and cultural. Angela Veronica Wong writes ELSA as a dual universe in textual miniature, with vulnerability and strength balancing expertly on the same psychological precipice: 'Elsa, / when everything's a secret one can't tell / if things are said in warning or said / with hope. Maybe you will know the difference.'" --Khadijah Queen "Angela Veronica Wong infuses this very intense series of sonnets by restlessly changing tone, critiques, and language. Each poem pokes at a different nerve, and I can't help but get invested in Elsa's hijinks. While Wong narrates, 'Elsa, everything is dark and getting / even darker,' there are moments of humor and lightness, of intimacy as well. In short lines one after another, this impeccably constructed book layers critique with interrogation and sincerity. Heavy in implication, our fictional Elsa leaps from the page, walks around our world, and gives us raucous glimpses into hers." --Carmen Gimenez Smith

elsa: an unauthorized autobiography

Literature & Fiction

Wong, Angela Veronica

Poetry

Black Radish Books

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "A princess starts a hotel fire. How to survive? Become a poet. Become Angela Veronica Wong. 'How we remember is formed like glass,' she writes. How we remember—survive and remember. 'I placed a book upside down on your piano,' the poet writes. It is this book, formed like music. Read it."—Honor Moore "Asphyxiation, falling plants, and abandoned buildings—this is just the beginning of Angela Veronica Wong's debut collection which is both an exploration and a meditation of intimacy and its fracturing. Playing children 'scream like death,' there are 'black cliffs' and traces of mascara on pillowcases the day after. These poems embrace mythologies and enact fairy tales as a stand-in for disappointment and rejections. As the collection moves through scenes of domesticity and urban life, there's a subtle shifting away (but never a complete departure) from youthful naïveté into a quiet violence and desperation of one who knows too much. HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE is our tender riot and slow sad swan song, as we lie awake watching an empty street fill with sleet."—Steven Karl "I love the way each section in Angela Veronica Wong's HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE shifts from form to form. There's a protean urgency in the way her work flickers on the page and morphs from section to section. What this collection offers isn't so much the answer to its title, but a type of slow burning inferno. One that reminds us our lives are interminably, inescapably, beautifully burning down."—Ben Mirov

how to survive a hotel fire

Coconut Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wong, Angela Veronica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wong, Angela Veronica

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wong, Angela Veronica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

elsa: an unauthorized autobiography

how to survive a hotel fire